It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the
Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks. Researchers
there also developed the first personal computer (the Xerox Alto) and
the graphical user interface that still drives computer usage today.According to a book about Xerox PARC,
"Dealers of Lightning" (by Michael Hiltzik), its top researchers
realized they couldn't wait for the government to connect different
networks, so would have to do it themselves. "We have a more immediate
problem than they do," Robert Metcalfe told his colleague John Shoch in
1973. "We have more networks than they do." Mr. Shoch later recalled
that ARPA staffers "were working under government funding and university
contracts.

Also interesting is that Xerox sat on its invention for awhile, which is where Jobs comes in.

having created the Internet, why didn't Xerox become the biggest
company in the world? The answer explains the disconnect between a
government-led view of business and how innovation actually happens.
Executives at Xerox headquarters in Rochester, N.Y., were focused on
selling copiers. From their standpoint, the Ethernet was important only
so that people in an office could link computers to share a copier.
Then, in 1979, Steve Jobs negotiated an agreement whereby Xerox's
venture-capital division invested $1 million in Apple, with the
requirement that Jobs get a full briefing on all the Xerox PARC
innovations. "They just had no idea what they had," Jobs later said,
after launching hugely profitable Apple computers using concepts
developed by Xerox.

Gordon Crovitz concludes:

As for the government's role, the Internet was fully privatized in 1995,
when a remaining piece of the network run by the National Science
Foundation was closed—just as the commercial Web began to boom.
Economist Tyler Cowen wrote in 2005: "The Internet, in fact, reaffirms
the basic free market critique of large government. Here for 30 years
the government had an immensely useful protocol for transferring
information, TCP/IP, but it languished. . . . In less than a decade,
private concerns have taken that protocol and created one of the most
important technological revolutions of the millennia."

In other words, we'd still be waiting for the internet if the government had been in charge.